


[Meta] Response to "Good Omens Analysis and Feelings: Psycho-philosophy" by chaoticlivi

by Readertee



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Analysis, Essays, Gen, Meta, Meta and Analysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:40:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25220275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Readertee/pseuds/Readertee
Summary: This is a response to chapters 39-41 of "Good Omens Analysis and Feelings" by chaoticlivi, which started off as a comment but got too long. The three chapters examine how Heaven and Hell seem to hold collectivist and individualist philosophies, respectively; how Aziraphale and Crowley conform to and break from this; and how this maps to the "Angel and Devil on your shoulder" idea of morality and the more recent (but also inaccurate to actual current psychological theory) idea of the id, ego and superego, with humanity, and particularly Adam, forming the ego.
Kudos: 6





	[Meta] Response to "Good Omens Analysis and Feelings: Psycho-philosophy" by chaoticlivi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chaoticlivi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticlivi/gifts).
  * Inspired by [[Meta] Good Omens Analysis and Feelings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20621228) by [chaoticlivi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticlivi/pseuds/chaoticlivi). 



Aziraphale and Crowley at the start of Good Omens believe they are representatives of opposing sides, Heaven and Hell, which are good and evil respectively. By the end of the story, they have come to realise this is wrong and have formed their own side with humanity. It is a little difficult to make out what the narrative of the story, rather than the characters, believes to be good or evil, but this is to be expected as while good stories don't have overt worldviews, they will have an underlying worldview which informs the narrative of the story, and often is more effective than nonfiction arguments for those worldviews. In the case of Good Omens, the narrative centres around people from opposing sides coming together in mutual understanding, which prevents the end of the world. The original book narrative has a lot of parallels and allusions to the mindset of the NATO nations, particularly the USA and UK, and the USSR during the Cold War, which had recently ended at the time it was written; the TV adaptation updates this somewhat to present more of a rival-corporations dynamic between Heaven and Hell.

Despite Heaven and Hell traditionally being considered the Ultimate Good and Ultimate Evil respectively, the narrative doesn't have an explicit definition for good or evil, but implicitly it invites the audience to make a lot of judgements on the meaning of good and evil, and whether such a dichotomy can meaningfully exist based on what we are shown of how the two operate - for example the book has Aziraphale and Crowley compare lists of humans their Head Offices lay claim to and find significant overlap, while the show includes a scene just before Noah's Flood where Crowley points out that killing kids is something you'd expect from Hell rather than Heaven, and also a scene at the Crucifixion where he objects to the suffering of Jesus. The system of Heaven/Hell, although it pretends to be two opposing systems, is in fact one system with two binary halves that reinforce each other. This is superficially somewhat similar to the id/superego construction on a universal scale, with the Earth becoming the ego, but the system imposes standards of good and evil which are inherently contradictory and hypocritical - Earth-as-ego cannot win.

These narrative judgements are largely built on a framework of consideration for the characters as people separate from the systems of which they are a part, but also balancing that with a consideration of the communities they choose to be a part of - here, I'm trying to differentiate and different names helps that, so systems are imposed structures while communities are entered into voluntarily. (Realistically this is a spectrum in constantly evolving equilibrium, but the different names gives the impression of a binary, where the narrative rejects binaries all over the place and introducing a new binary is something I'm trying to steer away from! Then too, the narrative of any story is a contained way to look at issues, and can't be as nuanced as nonfiction, but is far more interesting.)

The Heaven/Hell system is imposed upon its members, mostly by feelings of obligation and lack of other options, while Aziraphale and Crowley choose to be part of a community with humanity by the end of the story; this is reflected by the various human characters and their dynamics. Anathema's family and their system of reliance on, and belief in the infallibility of, Agnes Nutter's prophecies, comes up against Newt's lack of ability to really believe in anything and tendency to prevent the systems of computers and other devices doing what they're supposed to. Sergeant Shadwell is part of the Witchfinder Army, a nearly defunct system which targets women as agents of evil magic and temptation, while Madame Tracy is both a medium (communing with spirits/the dead is perhaps the original magic), and a sex worker (certain types of men insist this is the worst kind of temptation), and they end up coming to an understanding with each other and planning to marry. The Them and Adam's parents all pull Adam, in their own ways, away from the system of Heaven and Hell and their insistence he was predestined to end the world regardless of what he wanted. All of this was built on using love to build connections between people which they could rely on instead of simply serving their system out of obligation. Like Crowley and Aziraphale, the momentum mostly pulls one member away from a collective which encourages selflessness toward the ingroup of other collective members and theoretically others the collective is protecting (Anathema's protecting the world that's slated for Armageddon, Shadwell the innocent people being hurt by witches, and Adam the environment such as the whales and rainforests, while Aziraphale's been trying to protect humanity from the predations of Hell since Eden). The collective, despite its stated intentions, nevertheless damages both its individual members and those outside the collective, and thus needs to be broken from, but an individualist system where everyone goes only after their own goals rather than helping each other would be just as damaging and futile. The community which is built instead must therefore be not as focused on the collective, but stabilise in a balanced equilibrium with other people rather than a straight individualistic state. I would hope everyone who was present at the airbase would keep in touch, if only to protect each other from reprisals by Heaven and Hell, and perhaps form their own community of people who Understand about the Apocanot because if the humans remember much of anything that's got to be some heavy stuff to live with.

The view of Heaven and Hell as two halves of human nature (or as id and superego) works as a metaphor of opposing forces, but once you start to map that onto people or characters it begins to break down, because it is too simplistic a framework. Angels and Demons may try to mould themselves into perfect reflections of their respective ideologies, but Hell is an organised society and therefore needs a lot of selflessness to function and Heaven is made up of individuals who inevitably see things from their own often selfish perspectives. The selfishness of Hell's denizens is ruthlessly moulded to serve Satan's own selfishness by violence when they go against what he wants, and outright control in every way where that doesn't work (eg Crowley's instructions dropping straight into his head). Meanwhile Heaven's denizens subsume their own wants and needs in favour of working towards the Greater Good - but this is determined not by everyone deciding together what course would do the most good, relieve bad the most, or even help the greatest number of people, but by the Great Plan saying so. The ones who benefit most from this, incidentally, are the Archangels, whose want to show the demons their gang is better appears to line up to the Great Plan and its War almost suspiciously well. We have no real evidence God, supposedly the source of goodness, is talking to anyone including the Metatron. But that's largely irrelevant because even if the Archangels are acting as selflessly as possible in furtherance of the Great Plan, such a selflessness erases what the people in the system want or need in favour of focusing on the end goal of the War, which all things considered is not a worthwhile goal for anyone living on Earth or even the majority of Angels or Demons, who would wipe each other out to a large extent regardless of which side eventually claims victory. Both of these extremes of theoretically-individualist, follow-your-selfish-instincts Hell and mostly-collectivist, imposition-of-higher-morality Heaven, and the system they work together to form, are monstrous, because they treat the people in that system as mere extensions of itself, disposable and interchangeable tools, while treating the collective as an end in itself rather than a framework for helping everyone in it become greater than the sum of their individual parts. Ignoring individuals and imposing collectivism top-down, rather than (as would be the ideal) bottom-up building a community where individuals can satisfy their wants and needs and in so doing contribute to and fulfill the collective's needs and goals, ends up grinding down the individuals and warping the collective, while allowing everyone to pit against each other in pursuit of individual goals until the collective needs something and brings the hammer down to get them all to pursue that goal instead breeds paranoia, working at cross-purposes and gross inefficiency. Neither of these methods are sustainable, except by the constant threat of violence if individuals are too obvious in deviating from the ineffective system (most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused by people just being people, rather than Hell tempting them towards evil or Heaven encouraging them towards good, remember).

We don't see much from individuals within the Heaven/Hell system at large, of course, only Aziraphale and Crowley, who have after all been slowly getting further and further away from what the system wants them to be as they stayed for millennia away from the worst of the reinforcement of that system, on Earth with humanity. They started out as one character and were later separated, which feeds into being the id/superego of a single consciousness, and you can still see traces of that, but each being their own character brings aspects of superego into Crowley and id into Aziraphale with both gaining their own (very anxious!) egos. Meanwhile at a system level they are considered extensions or tools of Heaven and Hell by their respective bosses, but by the end of the story they are fully their own people. They have grown beyond just being (according to tradition and both Heaven and Hell's rather arbitrary-seeming definitions) the enablers of good or evil impulses of humanity at large and come to an Arrangement where as long as what their bosses want gets done, it doesn't matter which part of their own little two-person side does what. Crowley in particular sees that nothing they do regarding humanity actually makes a large difference, in the long term, and switches to affecting as many people as possible rather than tempting individuals. They both try in their own ways to keep the other safe and happy, because they love each other, rather than as with Heaven and Hell respectively where they both feel they have to do as they're told and have a loyalty based on obligation and an expectation of severe punishment if they don't obey. A lot of defence mechanisms got employed by both of them until they managed to split from Heaven and Hell, because Crowley would have been destroyed by either side and probably tortured first, while Aziraphale might have Fallen (torture and semi-destruction in one, how convenient!) or possibly also tortured and destroyed. Heaven and Hell do try this in the show, though not in the book, but Aziraphale is only really at risk (at least in his own mind) from reprisals by his own side, while Crowley might be at risk from either and is more likely to be destroyed. Thus Aziraphale employs the bulk of the defence mechanisms, and puts more effort into following the rules at least to the letter if not the spirit, while Crowley is more reckless in rulebreaking even as he gets paranoid ensuring they won't get caught or can defend themselves if they are found out. Each acts as each other's stabilising influence, allowing each other to grow beyond the "id/superego" framework of their Sides to become their own full people, on their own side.

Angels and Demons representing the "good" and "evil", or selfless and selfish/id and superego, impulses of humanity in general can be narrowed down into Aziraphale and Crowley finding their own balance between the two in the Arrangement. This eventually leads to them working together in influencing Warlock, who they believe to be the Antichrist, hoping that the child will find a balance between those two influences and end up rejecting both Hell and Heaven and becoming more or less an ordinary boy by default. This doesn't work, for the simple reason that Warlock isn't the Antichrist, and from what we see as the audience he ends up a little bratty, as might be expected from a kid with his sort of rich-but-emotionally-distant parents, but otherwise relatively normal. He's likely to need some therapy to sort out his childhood issues when he's older, but probably isn't too traumatised. Good job guys!

Meanwhile the actual Antichrist, Adam, has grown up in a stereotypical English village in Oxfordshire, with loving middle-class parents and a gang of loyal friends practically lifted straight out of an Enid Blyton or Just William book. He's relatively normal under human influence, until his powers start manifesting on his eleventh birthday. At this point, he starts using them - at first unconsciously - to make things better in the world, but as he starts to see that his efforts are not enough to change the things that are wrong he gets more and more frustrated with other people, like whalers and people cutting down the rainforest or causing radioactive waste, and thinking he should force them to stop or even destroy the whole thing and start over. Parallel to that, since the powers come from Hell they push him to be more and more selfish and lean more towards destroying everyone making the world worse and rule it all himself. He wants to keep his human friends with him, which already goes against Hell which wants him to destroy all of humanity, but doesn't care that everyone else will die, including his friends' loved ones. This horrifies the Them, and eventually Adam listens to his friends telling him to fix, not destroy, the world. He rejects Heaven and Hell trying to push him to use his powers to start the war, recognising that they are both acting purely in their own interests to "see whose gang is best" and not in the interests of Earth or humanity as a whole nor individual humans. In the book, he admonishes them for "messing people about" with their temptations and attempted Apocalypse.

Aziraphale and Crowley don't act as superego and id to Adam's ego, because by the time they feature he's already made his decision with the humans around him, particularly the Them. They have also, by this point, taken a stand against their own sides. However, all three of them stand together against a very pissed off Satan, as tools of this system who have become their own people, with both Angel and Demon acting together to encourage Adam in rejecting his bio-father and the majority of his supernatural powers yet not embracing Heaven in the process. He's ended up balanced between the two, and simply human the same as any other human - albeit with some latent powers as seen by his altering the hedge to let Dog escape the garden, but some humans do have powers, such as Anathema's witchcraft, so that doesn't remove him from humanity.

After the day the world would have ended, everyone chooses to come together in their own ways. The Them invite Adam to come with them to see the circus setting up (though he can't because he's grounded and then ends up scrumping from RP Tyler's orchard), but all the adults are given romantic or romance-coded endings: Anathema and Newt may or may not stay together long term, but they seem ready to make a go of it on their own terms, without guidance from the Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies; Shadwell and Madame Tracy are planning to get married and move into a bungalow together; and Crowley and Aziraphale save each other from their former sides (in the show) and go to the Ritz to the background music playing "A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square", a romantic song from WWII which mentions Angels dining at the Ritz and also uses the symbolism of a nightingale throughout - in English folk symbolism, nightingales represent poetry, particularly love poetry, and thus a hidden love being declared openly in poetic courtship. All of them have made their own sides in defiance of the oppressive systems which were trying to force them to oppose each other, and reconciled the opposing forces which would have pushed them apart.


End file.
